How Cinderella Entered My Life (And refused to leave me alone!)

Welcome to A Week of Cinderella!  I'm so excited to kick things off!!

I hope you're as excited about this week's celebrations as I am!


I grew up with fairy tales.  Who hasn't?  Disney was a childhood staple, as was a battered book of child-friendly retellings.  As with most children, I outgrew most of my whimsical fairy tale daydreams by mid-middle school (Since how can you outgrow Disney when they're creating gems such as THE LION KING and ALADDIN for you to love?).  Fairy tales became a cherished memory, but nothing more.

Until the day everything changed.

I belonged to some by-mail book club.  I ordered a book called ELLA ENCHANTED by Gail Carson Levine.  This book was my first introduction to what I lovingly call "fractured fairy tales."  Who knew that there could be more than one version of the story I grew up with?  I certainly didn't!  I was swept away in the knowledge that Ella was about my age and knew the prince BEFOREHAND.  Wow, what a shocker!  I also loved the way she came into her own destiny and didn't rely on the prince for help.  Heck, she got HIM out of some tough situations!  I adored the book on so many levels.  It made a HUGE impression on me and changed the way I  looked at fairy tales.  In fact, ELLA ENCHANTED remains the only book on my All-Time Top Five Books List that's a MG/YA novel (Granted, most of that is probably nostalgia, alas...!).

And then...THEN!!  The movie EVER AFTER with Drew Barrymore came out.  It was in all the teen magazines I read. There were even these awesome movie postcard tearouts (example, left) that you could collect if you got each of the ten magazines with a unique card.  I went nuts!  EVER AFTER was the first movie I ever saw twice in the theater, and the first I saw opening day.  It was the first time I got to experience a showing full of people seeing a movie for the first time together and laughing and cheering when Cinderella slugs her stepsister, etc.  It was magical, and I had to see it again!  I preordered it on VHS (Yessss, VHS) from Blockbuster or some-such because they were giving out a giftcard with an image of Drew Barrymore in her beautiful gown.  I coveted that giftcard (I still use giftcards for bookmarks, too!).  I watched the VHS tape so many times that I literally wore it out.  It was one of the first movies I purchased on DVD when I went to college and had a DVD player in my computer.  It was my favorite movie for years until MOULIN ROUGE came around and knocked it down to Number Two (Where it still remains).  I even have the movie novelization somewhere around here!  This movie enveloped me completely, from the magic and enchantment to the costumes and makeup to the breathless romance and the relationship that built between Cinderella and her Prince over the course of a couple of hours.  This movie is perfection.

These two brushes with Cinderella changed me completely.  After being introduced to them, I found myself discovering more fractured fairytales, from Donna Jo Napoli's ZEL to Gregory Maguire's WICKED.  Now, I have a couple of shelves in my bookcase dedicated solely to fairy tales.  Heck, I'm even writing a fairy tale right now!  Without ELLA ENCHANTED and EVER AFTER, without discovering these vastly altered forms of Cinderella during the time I was most impressionable to new ideas, I don't know where--or who--I'd be today!

How has the story of Cinderella impacted your life?